A Visible Darkness - By Jonathon King Page 0,73

in a booth at a cop bar named Brownie’s.

I’d spent the day on the streets looking for the dark shape of Eddie Baines. I tried to think like him, a man who could hide himself out in the open, someone who worked in the corners of a neighborhood where he both belonged and didn’t belong. The crime scene guys at the Baines house had found signs that someone had been there. Food crumbs that were new, scuffings on the dusty floors that showed the drag of a heavy boot. What was in a man’s head who could bind his mother and leave her in a closet to rot?

With no authority and carrying the obvious white man’s presence in a racial community, I’d poked through an abandoned bus depot near the interstate. I had introduced myself to an ancient man with a face creased and dry like dark and weathered leather at the local recycling shop. I walked the edges of the park and pulled up at the rear of the small local groceries, studying the knots of men with yellowed eyes who looked up first with anticipation and then turned away, waiting for the sound of my door opening and the yelp of some command. When I got out and showed the booking photo of Baines to a group of men playing dominoes at a corner park, they simply stared through the square of glossy paper and shook their heads. Three times during the day and into the night I’d crossed paths with patrol cops doing the same thing I was. Word had been passed at their shift briefings that I was a P.I. working the case independently. At dusk the one called Taylor crossed me at a four-way stop, pulling his cruiser into the middle of the intersection where he sat for several seconds, blocking my way, looking with a blank face into my windshield before slowly moving on.

With Billy feeding her insurance information and his own list of computer acquaintances, Richards and a BSO computer-crime expert named Robshaw had spent the day looking for someone who they could muscle into admitting they’d downloaded a stolen hard drive for a big, drawling ex-cop looking for anonymity.

Everyone was exhausted by our collective lack of success.

“We did six guys in Miami, eight here in Broward and at least that many in Palm Beach,” Richards said. “Hell we’ve got as many ex-con hackers as we’ve got bank heist guys.”

“One of our 1-leads is living in a two-story b-beach house overlooking the Gulf in K-Key Largo,” Billy said, keeping his voice purposely low in a public place.

“A man with a briefcase can steal more money than any man with a gun,” I said to no one in particular.

Richards’s eyes grinned with recognition of the song lyric. Billy just frowned.

“Don Henley, 1989,” I said. My friend just shook his head.

“Diaz and his guys already confiscated a dozen computers from the local pawn shops trying to find some crackhead who might have done Marshack, but the chances are slim on that side,” Richards said.

Her eyes were red-rimmed and the irises had faded to gray and I tried to catch them with my own when she locked onto something over my shoulder.

I turned and saw Hammonds making his way to the bar. Several of the officers in the place instinctively turned away from him, all of them losing two inches of height as their necks disappeared into their shoulders. It was nearly midnight, but the chief was still in his suitcoat. The knot of his tie had not been loosened.

“Give me a couple of minutes,” Richards said, sliding out of her side of the booth.

I watched her move across the room and stop at Hammonds’s side, and the two of them stood at the bar and leaned into their elbows for a guarded conversation.

“You know the history b-behind this p-place?” Billy said, and I shook my head, knowing he did. There was age in the wood of the long, standard bar. The ceilings were low and the wall paneling knotted and lacquered.

“In the 1930s there was a live band performing every Saturday in the back,” he explained, tipping his head to a door that opened up onto the parking lot. “It w-was an open air d-dance floor and drew a young crowd. S-Some of the old-time attorneys tell about s-seeing Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald here. At the t-time, black performers were n-not allowed to play at white d-dances in Dade County. To m-make